Mindful Eating for the New Year

Forget the fad diets and restrictive weight loss regimens! This year, approach your health in a new, better way–mindfully. Mindful eating will help you to savor your food and enjoy it more so you will eat what and how much your body needs. Listen as we cover some useful mindfulness practices that you can do at home from the book “Eating the Moment”.

Mindful Eating for the New Year – Podcast Transcript

That time is here again—the time when everyone seems to be focused on the new year and their resolutions to get organized, learn a new language, eat healthier, and lose weight. As you can expect, in this episode, I’m going to focus specifically on nutrition and diet-related resolutions.

Though I’ve never been a big fan of such resolutions, I do see that they can be valuable for some people if they’re done right. Now some may want to know why I’m not fond of resolutions. Here’s why: most people make crazy resolutions that they are never going to be able to keep and then suffer from discouragement and disappointment when they can’t meet their expectations of themselves. Many people also choose resolutions that are temporary in nature. For example, a diet is definitely temporary—someone will GO ON a diet to lose a certain amount of weight, and then after they have lost that weight they will go back to eating the way they like. Lifestyle changes, on the other hand, are more permanent in nature. Resolutions can also result in extreme behaviors. Someone will resolve him/herself to eat healthy foods ONLY and then they may go overboard and develop what is known as orthorexia when the person is obsessed with eating healthfully and won’t even go out with friends for lunch because they fear there won’t be anything healthy enough to eat. I’m sure you all know someone who has made a resolution that has one of these aspects in it.

So, now that you know why resolutions can fail early in the year,

Mindful Eating Practices

Here are some tips for making new year’s resolutions that you can keep for the whole of 2010, not just the first couple months:

Make it realistic, please. Don’t promise yourself that you will never eat a piece of chocolate again. Not going to happen! This also can be a trigger for you to binge on chocolate or any other food in the future because you have been restricting your consumption of that food. It’s part psychological, part physical, so be careful. Think mindful eating.

Keep it healthy. Going on a very extreme diet, say a fat free diet, or becoming a fruitarian is NOT healthy. You need a balance of all foods, yes that includes carbs and fats, in your daily diet. A diet that includes foods from all food groups in moderation is much better than an Atkins diet or a raw food diet.

Make it a lifestyle. Pick something that you can change that can be part of your life forever, like eating three fruits a day, or switching from butter to a non-hydrogenated margarine, or making one new recipe a month. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing like losing fifty pounds, getting rid of all sugar or salt, or something like that. You can keep it small and simple; that may even work better.

Tips for implementing Mindful Eating

I’ve already given you a few hints at some good, realistic, healthy lifestyle changes for the new year, but I have some more up my sleeve, so I’ll share them too:

How about going to a farmer’s market near you and buying some local produce? If you like it, you can go more often.

How about baking your own bread once a month? Again, if you like it and want to make the time for it, you can do it more often.

Also, try a new vegetable. Look up a healthy recipe online or in a cookbook and see if it’s something you want to eat again.

Exercise three times a week for thirty minutes. If you can do that, try to add a day or two more or up your time to 45 minutes.

Find a cookbook you want or a bunch of recipes you’ve been wanting to try, and cook them all on a Sunday so you don’t have to cook during the week, or start using a crockpot. Make eating home-cooked meals easy and healthy.

Set aside me-time. It will give you time to do things that YOU want, like a hobby or reading, listening to music or just relaxing. It also helps relieve stress and keep you from an impending nervous breakdown.

Switch from lard, shortening, or “vegetable oil” to specifically “Olive or canola” oil.